About the Distance Graph

Want to know the shortest, most-direct distance between your location and other cities worldwide? Ever wondered how far you are from a city relative to other locations in the same country, continent, latitude or longitude?

Distance graph of air distances from New York City, New York to cities around the world.

Our Distance Graph will not only calculate all this for you, but will also present the information in an easy-to-use interactive graph.

How to use the Distance Graph

Find the city you would like to find air distances from, on the list or by searching for it.

Click on the city link, and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Under the Coordinates section, click on the link that states See other cities near City X. This will take you to the Distance Graph page for your city.

Interpreting the Graph

The point at the center of the Distance Graph represents your city.

The grey points on one of the circles on the Graph represent other cities, while the arrow connecting your city and a point on the circle represents the direction and air distance between the two locations.

Please note that the concentric circles on the Graph do not denote latitudes.

Moving the scroll bar from left to right will increase the scale of the Graph.

Pressing the Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons right below the Graph also changes the Graph's scale.

The scale for the Graph is marked in red between the two outer circles on the Graph (bottom right hand side). The scale changes as you scroll from left to right.

Hovering over the grey dot marking a city, or over the arrow connecting your location to the city, will show you how far the two cities are, and the direction (in degrees) of the second city from your location.

Clicking on the arrow line connecting your location with another city will take you to the Distance Calculator page for the two cities.

Clicking on the Full Screen button will open the Graph in full screen.

To the right of the Graph you will find information regarding the coordinates of your location; distance of your location from the Poles, and the Equator; other cities on the same latitude, and longitude; and locations farthest away from your city.

Air distance or great circle distance between New York City and a number of other cities.

The list also displays the current local time in a city and the direction of the city from your location.

Clicking on the name of a city on this list will take you to the city page, where you can find more information about the city, including, but not limited to, current local time, time zone information, Daylight Saving Time (DST) dates, weather forecasts, and dialing codes.

You can sort air distances between your location and other cities by using the Sort By dropdown menu under the distance graph. Sort by:

Country: Alphabetically sorts by country, and gives a list of capital cities.

Time: Lists cities by time zone , starting from cities in time zone farthest away from your location in the West to cities in time zone farthest away from your location in the East.

Distance: This option gives you a list of cities closest to the farthest from your location.

Direction: This option sorts cities by their direction relative to your location. It lists cities in clockwise direction.

You can change the location which you would like to find out the air distance from by searching for the city in the City Search box. Simply type in the name of another city and press enter or click on GO . Doing this will change the graph and the list below it.

You can customize some information in the list below the graph by clicking on the Settings tab. Here you can choose the following customizable options:

Time Format: Choose between different time formats.

Display Seconds: Choose whether to display seconds when looking at a city's local time.

Distance/ Visibility: This option changes the distance units on the graph and the distance list. You can choose between displaying the distances in kilometers, meters, miles, and nautical miles.

Common questions

Why does the distance graph show a location to be in a different direction than my map does?

The distance graph illustrates the shortest, great circle or air distance between any two locations. This means that it shows the shortest distance between any two locations on the Earth as measured by drawing a path along the surface of the Earth. The shortest distance between some cities, especially those closer to the Poles, may be over the Poles.

Maps are distorted projections of the three-dimensional spherical Earth on to a two dimensional plane. Simply put, a map is a flattened version of the globe. Because of this, the direction of a city from a location as shown by the distance graph, which shows the great circle distance, may not be the same as the direction shown by a map.

When I sort the list below the graph by Country, why do I get a list of cities?

This sorting option alphabetically sorts countries (A to Z) and then shows the air distance between your location and the capital city of the country. So, even though the list does not look alphabetically sorted (Algiers after Tirana), it is arranged by country.

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